So our doubts were confirmed. The Avengers was simply being kept under wraps because it doesn't make the grade. Expensive? Yes. Extravagant? Yes. Full of wild special effects and exotic locations? Yes. Good? No.

Think of a second rate, big budget Bond film and you can begin to get the picture. It even has Sean Connery playing the arch villain - here a tartan-clad megalomaniac, Sir August de Wynter, who is holding the world to ransom by controlling the weather patterns.

The Avengers doesn't show a great deal of respect for narrative or plot, prefering to play on mood, style and some very limp humour revolving around those old English chestnuts of taking tea and talking about the weather. The tone of the film is peculiar. It's not something that you are drawn into easily.

It looks very similar to the original, with empty streets, timeless fashions that lean toward the Sixties, and a classic backdrop of historic buildings, English countryside and London buses. But the obsession with matching the style and aesthetic of the original also prevents the film from trying anything new, save for in the special effects department.

In the end, the story seems only to exist to move the characters into one contrived scene after another, some of which are very strange. At one bizarre point Sean Connery addresses a table of co-conspirators dressed up in different coloured teddy bear suits.

There are a few things to recommend the film. The special effects are brilliant, in particular the storm sequences over London and an excellent chase where our undynamic duo are pursued in their E-type Jag by a swarm of large, machine-gun-firing robotic flies. The flies incidentally are being controlled by Connery's henchman Eddie Izzard. (Surprisingly, for a comedian who is renowned for his rambling verbiage, he has little to say in the film.)

Connery plays his role with relish and ease. He's seen enough Blofelds in his time. The two leads are more problematic. In the original Sixties television story, Patrick MacNee's Steed had a debonair nonchalance (he's back here in a minor role as an invisible agent). Ralph Fiennes is a colder, stiffer and altogether less charismatic model.

Uma Thurman as Mrs Peel has mastered her round, English vowels (she even mouths the old elocution exercise "how now Brown cow" perfectly), and shimmies seductively about in a skin tight black cat suit; but there is more chemistry in a couple of soggy tea bags than between Thurman and Fiennes.

Part of the problem is in the filming itself: scenes do not always flow into one another easily. But it is also back to that old problem of tone: in the television series Steed and Mrs Peel joshed and teased, but physicality was too un-English. While trying to recreate the Sixties look and feel, the film tries to keep up with the times when it comes to sexual politics.

Flirtation is more overt here. Peel, on the first meeting, struts in on Steed while he is having a naked sauna at his men-only club. Yet, in other parts of their relationship, they carry on in this stiff, formal manner. Where's the fun gone? Where's the class?